First lady Michelle Obama is the most popular member of the Obama administration, and Democrats say she’s the one they want to see more of in the midterms.

She’s a woman and an African-American, with a direct appeal to two groups that the Democrats need to turn out in major numbers in November. She can bring the Obama brand without the baggage of President Barack Obama himself. She can go to states where he can’t. She’s a fresh draw for donors and voters.

So where is she? Democrats want an answer — they desperately need the help, and especially the cash.

Campaign officials are worried about keeping up with the flow of spending by super PACs and political nonprofits. Field operations alone are going to cost many multiples of what they did in 2012, and tough decisions about which races to cut off are getting closer by the day.

But her distaste for politics and fundraising is well-known, and her relationships with members of Congress don’t tend to be extensive. She has met donors only a couple of times and filmed a commit-to-vote video she put out Sunday for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. The video’s had fewer than 30,000 hits as of Tuesday afternoon.

Her husband, by contrast, has held four dozen fundraisers so far — with more planned despite attacks from Republicans for keeping up that schedule in the face of world crises.

That limited involvement isn’t sitting well with Democratic strategists worried about the amount of outside spending pouring into midterm campaigns.

“She has the opportunity to maintain the hope and the idealism that so many of us had during the 2008 and 2012 elections,” said Casey Mann, the Democratic Party executive director in North Carolina, where the president’s initial popularity has more than faded. “She provides an opportunity for regular folks to connect outside of that gridlock, to be able to connect to the message without having the same institutional opposition so to speak.”

The White House would not comment about the first lady’s plans for the midterms, but operatives expect her to follow her 2012 model and stick to get-out-the-vote and voter registration events rather than engage in much outright campaigning. But it’s too early in the season for any campaign stops to be scheduled, leaving her level of involvement a very open question.

“She’d motivate votes like crazy,” said Georgia Democratic Chairman DuBose Porter, who oversees another marginal state where Democrats are hoping to win despite the Obama drag.

The list of places where Democrats think the first lady could be influential for others is very long: governors races in Pennsylvania, Illinois, Florida, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin. They also include Senate races in Iowa, Michigan, Georgia, Louisiana, even Kentucky. On the list are House races just about everywhere.

“She’s popular everywhere — even in places the president is not,” said one Democratic strategist involved in 2014 races.

Every poll shows that the Democrats are going to struggle with turnout. But a Pew poll out earlier this month had her approval rating at 62 percent, while the president’s was at 50 percent. The DCCC, which polled its base in 67 competitive districts, found that she had an overall favorability of 77 percent: 89 percent among African-Americans, 79 percent with white women over 30, 79 percent with voters age 18 to 29.

“Demographically, she connects with the very voters that we need — women, African-Americans, young people, Hispanics. They feel a connection to her,” said DCCC Executive Director Kelly Ward. “So when she can ask them personally, ‘I need you to go do this, my husband is fighting for the issues that you care about and he needs your help,’ that’s a really compelling ask and a really compelling person to be making that ask.”

The surest way to get a White House staffer laughing is to bring up the rumor that the first lady might run for Illinois Senate one day. But a number of leading Democratic strategists read her limited involvement in the 2014 campaigns as a sign that she doesn’t think her party can take the House or break through the gridlock in the Senate, and that it wouldn’t be worth suffering through campaigning and taking time away from her daughters over the end of summer vacation and the beginning of the new school year.

The first lady’s office would not comment on that presumed pessimism or whether she will be more involved this fall, given the influence the midterms could have on the last two years of the Obama presidency.

Over the past week, she appeared at Democratic National Committee events in Chicago and Washington, challenging Democrats last week “to be engaged right from the beginning.”

Worried Democrats say she’s not following her own advice.

“We need you to write the biggest, fattest check that you can possibly write,” she told the crowd. “Writing those checks is the single-most impactful thing that you can do right now.”

Democratic operatives are reluctant enough to speak out publicly about what the president isn’t doing for them. With a first lady whom they fear will be nearly impossible to coax out onto the campaign trail as is and who has a reputation for keeping a catalog of slights, they would only express their growing impatience with her lack of political involvement on condition of anonymity, despite some promises that her presence will ultimately be robust, with planning underway.

“She can deliver the sense of urgency we need this cycle — remind folks that there’s still work to be done and we need more friends in Congress to help us do it,” said one national Democratic strategist.

“She is popular in Kentucky, and I think would be helpful in Kentucky,” Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear said during a visit to the White House earlier this year, saying only that the president himself would be welcome too.

But the DCCC has nothing new to announce. The Democratic Governors Association, the House Majority PAC and the Senate Majority PAC don’t either.

They’re not just counting fundraisers. Democrats don’t have anything else even on the level of the DCCC video to point to when asked about help from the first lady.

It’s not like the first lady is short on frustrations with Republicans in Congress.

“It’s gotten so bad, they’re even trying to block the work that I do on childhood obesity,” she said in Chicago, recalling how one of her top causes got drawn into the political debate in recent months. “And that’s really saying something.”

Democrats’ eagerness for Michelle Obama to lead the charge for them in responding couldn’t be higher.

“The first lady has been incredibly supportive of the work we are doing around the country to hold our majority. She is not only popular with Democrats, but voters across the spectrum,” said DSCC Executive Director Guy Cecil.

Nearly two months later, they’re still raving about her appearance at a Boston DCCC fundraiser, where people waited for hours, through a long line of speakers and gaps between speakers, for her to finally take the stage.

When they did, the crowd went wild, responding to each emotional build-up, dropped voice, exclamation.

“She was electric,” Ward said. “It felt like it was both incredibly intimate and incredibly powerful.”

She ran through the stats for a few of the local candidates — Carol Shea-Porter, Ann McLane Kuster, John Tierney. But the number she focused most on was 17, the amount of seats Democrats need to take the majority. As enthusiastic as most Democrats try to be about holding onto that hope, most people in the know admit privately that they know it won’t happen.

But the first lady managed to get them inspired anyway.

“That’s a doable number,” she said. “It’s on us. All of us — this is on us.”